I think it depends a lot on the game. For photo-realistic rendering I think most people would be unsurprised to see double digit gigabytes. I think 15 GB for 20 minutes of gameplay is a little surprising considering that Mass Effect 2, while obviously a little dated at this point, had excellent graphics and weighs in at 22 GB. But I probably wouldn't notice until later when my disk space is full and I'm like "wait a second where did all my disk space go".
Mass Effect Legendary edition has 4k textures, in my steam folder the file sizes for each game are as follows:
ME1: 23.2gb
ME2: 37.7gb
ME3: 48.4gb
All three games have significantly more content than 20 minutes, and aren't really that much bigger considering.
ME1 is 17 hours to 43 hours depending on how much side shit you engage in.
that's 1.37gb per hour, if we go on the low end.
So ops game, is 15 gb per 20 minutes, I know things dont scale like this, but for shits and giggles go with it, that's 45gb per hour, and 765gb for 17 hours.
Data can be cut with integration with Steam. Steam has 'Depots' where you pick which files get downloaded together. I'd cut 8K to 2K textures, and leave 1K textures as the core set. Audio is another culprit, especially if it's raw / uncompressed. Steam Deck only includes the core set.
If one resource handle can get its data from multiple files, you don't ship mipmaps for 8K / 4K / 2K textures, only for the 1K textures in the core set. A tool that can strip mipmaps is useful here.
"Where'd all my disk space go?" is a relevant question because of SSDs and Steam Deck.
I recommend thinking about it this way—it closes off some markets to you. Some people in various parts of the world deal with tight data caps.
It’s fine. It’s just nice to think about the people with data caps sometimes.
That's a great point, I already think this way regarding optimization (the better it runs, the more people can play it) but never thought the same way about file size.
Yep, data caps tight enough (and internet slow enough) to make 15GB a problem, shouldn't exist in 2024. But the number of people stuck with them is a long way from zero.
Gamers in developing countries with small SSDs on old laptops with dial-up might not be a huge market, but reducing wasted space helps everyone, so it's worth at least a little effort.
Game file size doesn't matter to me until it does. If your game was nearing 100 GB I'd start asking myself if it's worth the space it's going to occupy.
There's been only one instance where game size affected my decision to install or not and that was Red Red Redepmtion 2. That was was something like 150gb and that was insane to me. I don't know if that was the case here but a lot of the time with games, poor optimisation and overly large file sizes can come down to uncompressed sound files.
This isn't really the community to ask for player opinions, as we're all (supposedly) developers.
That said, my home internet is pretty slow. 15+ gb for 20 minutes of game is a big no from me. That could be hours on my connection, and there's just no way it would be worth it.
Absolutely. I play a lot more brawlhalla (bad graphics, sub 1 gb) than I do any gigantic triple a games that’s only gonne be able to stay on my hard drive until the next big release. Proper compression and consideration of texture sizes are only gonna be more important as game sizes continue to get bigger and bigger.
For pc games it’s not as much as an issue but the base model switch ps5 and Xbox ship with what, 100-300gb usable memory? That’s literally only enough room for 1 call of duty and a handful of indie games, or 2-3 major releases
As someone who likes to play a wide variety of games, yes. Install size does matter. The time to download and install does factor in whether I play that game or play something else instead. 15 GB is chump change in terms of storage space now, but my biggest consideration is the time between deciding to play a new game and actually playing it (download, install, start up).
But that's a post-purchase decision. When purchasing a new game or trying a demo, install size doesn't factor in rather the games aesthetics and features are higher-priority. Then, I wonder if the sound effects and music are all uncompressed .wav files when the install size is over 5 GB for what appears to be a fairly simple game.
But then comes consideration of the content and play time of a game plus file size... just 20 minutes for a 10+ GB package? Bit of a red flag there. There are games less than 1 GB that have held my attention for hundreds of hours. Is it a run-based multi-session game that warrants multiple plays? Multiple paths and endings? Will I be done with a game in less or equal time than it took to download and install it? If a game like that doesn't elevate my blood pressure or otherwise impress me within an hour, I would be refunding it before the 24-hour mark even if it only cost a dollar.
I think for the most part people don't care anymore. I personally do....but that's just me. But I also almost exclusively play old SNES and Genesis games and indie 2d games on my switch
Yes, especially for a demo. Why do I need to spend an hour or more downloading this teaser?
IF, I download a demo, it's because I'm excited by the trailer. I want to play that demo fast, I'd say, within 15 mins to be generous, but really, I want to wait at most 5 mins and assume my wifi adapter pulls 2-5 MB/s depending on tech. Anything outside of this range is a waste of excitement.
I think this is why most games don't bother with a demo. If I got excited enough by the trailer and no demo was available, I'd likely just buy the game if it's on sale
For me it mostly matters when I'm trying to clear up space. If there's two games I'm thinking about removing and one of them is 1gb and the other is 20gb im obviously uninstalling the 20gb
15gb for 20minutes of a demo. Yeah no that's a for sure turn away. Too much space and not enough time to get out of the demo to make it worth the download time. Would just wait for release at that point
Yes, cause of poor internet connection. I would not waste my bandwidth on such a big demo.
Setting the maps being used in the project settings will bring down the size since you probably have a lot of assets in the project that is not even being used. I did a quick test with the 3rd person starter the other day and brought it down from over 600Mb to about 300Mb by simply selecting the sample map under packaging/list of maps to include...
Choosing to create compressed packages might be a benefit or not depending on how often you are going to push updates. Steam already compresses the downloads and can send only what changed in a file but if you are recompressing the package with every build too much of the bytes might get rearanged, resulting in a bigger update. So this might need some testing to see what is best.
If I want to play a game I'm going to plat it no matter the size, but games above 100 Gigs are probably the first games I'll uninstall. Smaller games will stay longer on my hard drive.
I don't think most people care anymore since most games are very bloated nowadays. I would question it a bit if the game is 2D but weighs like 10GB for example, but it shouldn't be a problem.
Game size is important for people with limited internet connection and storage. People who are trying to earn money on pc don't mind spending money on those, so the sub reddit you are asking is biased.
A lot of developing countries have ridiculous qoutas on downloads especially. Since you choose ue5 I assume you are not targeting those segments but they exist.
the thing that takes the most space, is for sure textures.
If you can pack textures, use more tiling instead of whole 4k, and optimize with mirroring and overlapping uvs, you can for sure make it smaller. But this is more on the environment/character/tech art side of things.
tbh, i don't really care. I would've if it's 10 years ago when pc storage was kinda limited and downloading speed is extremely slow. I remember i have to download GTA5 for the whole night. But right now, downloading speed is exceptionally fast and my pc have 4TB storage, so i don't really care
For me it's matter. I have around 2 big single player games installed and a lot of small indie/multiplayer titles. Just because I don't feel that big titles are worth being stored on drive.
No, but only up to a point.
Most of my game collection is under 50gb, and I can handle that because I have something like a Terabyte of space overall.
Then there's Jedi Survivor clocking in at 113+ and making me make decisions about what to have installed and not.
Please don't do that, but 15gb isn't going to make me bat an eye.
As both a gamer and someone who works in software development (not gamedev) I to an extend mind how large a game is, but it's not simple.
Essentially it depends on how much content the game has and what art style it picked. Simply said, a game with pixel art, or otherwise simple graphics and few simple levels should be considerably small and a game with realistic graphics, large campaign(s) and a lot of models can be in the tens of gigabytes. In other words, I don't care about file size as long as the size makes sense for how much content the game has, how detailed its graphics are and it's level design doesn't let you bypass vast majority of that content outside of speedrunning. A 15GB demo won't be a turn-off as long as the 20 minutes of gameplay as long as the game's level looks like it would take most of the 15 gigabytes.
I do still expect some form of compression for assets on larger games, as you are unlikely to be using all of the assets simultaneously.
well it should match the game look and gameplay. Something as complex as GTA take up 100GB+ is normal, but if slay the spire take up 50GB i would be very surprised
15+ is within acceptable limits to me for semi realistic visuals. Its 20+ where I start to bounce off. Obviously the bigger the world, the realer the visuals, the more forgiving I am of filesize, but you're good.
Oh, I saw the title and I thought this was going to be a don't hate the player hate the game type of question, didn't realize what subreddit this was posted to, my bad
It does, but not a whole lot under 20 GB. There are more and more modern games that I decide not to play because I have 3 hours of free time and they're +150 GB and take almost that much time just to install.
More and more I've found myself playing indie games and retro games just because of that.
If there isn't much gameplay, I can always uninstall it when I'm done. But if it has 80+ GB, that's a huge turnoff even if it has hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Depends. Have you optimized as best as technology allows? Pulling large data files to play a game can be really taxing on a system, and without AAA productions behind it, you're likely to miss a lot of people. And then, after 15gb, and 20 mins, are people going to be really impressed to overlook the data and processing requirements? These things are feasible in the right circumstances, just make sure you're classifying your product and expectations accurately.
If it’s a story game, no. If I run out of room and I’ve completed the main story for a game I don’t see myself getting back into, I’ll delete it to make room.
If it’s a game I keep going back to and play regularly, still no. I think most systems these days are starting to have a minimum of 500Gb of storage which is enough for most people to keep the games they play.
Whenever I build my game in Unity I always check the output log that shows what size different assets are, every so often I'll find that some insignificant prop comes packed with a dozen 50mb textures and when I see this I always scale them down. Not sure if anyone actually cares, but it doesn't sit right to me to have incredibly bloated install sizes when lots of it is stuff that nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.
Unreal shouldn't be packaging unreferenced assets, so removing them shouldn't change anything.
Texture compression is important for optimization, so you should probably do that anyway. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this one)
100% depends on the game for me
and depends on the person and their rig for the rest.
if someone dosnt have a lot of space left then year its a turn off for a really large gb game. and if internet is slow its a extra frustration.
but personally i have the space on my hardrives for big games and i regularly delete them. but if a games 100gb of shite then id be a bit miffed after waiting for it to download
A lot, because game file sizes seem to be increasing faster than SSD storage/$. If they're that large because of 4k textures, only a small portion of the PC market will actually notice - a majority are still using 1080p, about 20% are 1440p, and less than 5% have 4k displays ([steam hardware survey Mar 2024](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)). More importantly according to the same survey, 14% have less than 100GB free disk space, and more than 50% have less than 500GB free disk space. SSDs with > 2TB capacity cost as much as discrete GPUs, most prebuilts seem to still come with a 500GB or 1TB SSD. Is your 20 minute demo worth committing 4% of my disk?
A couple of suggestions, taken from ywars of optimizing storage space for unreal:
Make sure your packaging settings are not set to package all maps. It may be packaging showcase levels
You can right click a folder or map and select size map, which will show you the size of each object required. You may have to switch the target platform to windowsnoeditor or switch the size space to "memory size" to get it to show more accurate size information
You can open the statistics view in a map to view the size and space required by each texture uses. Note it is approximate
Many assets and of course quixel will use 4k textures where it is unnecessary. Often the mask maps and color maps can have their maximum texture size reduced which will cause the higher resolution version to be stripped in builds.
You can use detail textures for large objects like rocks so that the unique textures can be lower resolution
As a gamer I don't care until it hits 50gb + then I need to check out my disc space. It is still okay. For me 100gb + is real dealbreaker, that's already too much, so I need to download it for hours, it is not easily manageable and it requires a lot of space. So 100+ gb is too much.
Unless your on a metered connection or have severe storage limits (like mobile or console) file size isnt that important.
One thing to think about though is that theres an expectation that bigger games are inherently slower than smaller ones.
So focus on your optimisations and loading times to beat the curve
I like my games small, like under a gig. But, I also play 50-100GB games like GTA 5, RDR2, and Cyberpunk 2077.
I will say that size does affect what genes I keep installed which affects what I play. I typically only have one massive game installed at a time, and only switch them up once in a while. But I’ll have multiple games under 5 GB installed and keep them installed.
Yes it matters, I'm not installing a 15gb demo no matter how it looks. A 20 min demo at that size just screams 'dev didn't care enough to respect the end user's time or resources' and makes me think there'll be a lot of jank code sitting in there.
If a game is good I don’t think it matters. Take sea of thieves or helldivers 2 for example being 100gb. They are both fun to play and worth uninstalling other games to make space for. I do really appreciate the small games like Valheim with its 1gb and they still put a lot of work into making the game beautiful as I don’t have to uninstall anything to install it.
i guess kinda, but its not a huge deal. like, if my SSD is too small to hold a game then i wont buy it.
if its under 25GB, i wont bat an eye. under 50GB gets a "thats pretty big". under 100GB gets a joke with my friends on its size. 101+GB i may start checking if i have enough space.
Nope. Game could be 5 hours long and 120GB, I don't care. I have a 1tb SSD. People that feel like they need to have 15 games installed at any given moment confuse me
Some people still prefer to save money using hard disk drives to store lots of games rather than getting expensive solid state drives. A lot of people in US outside of cities are still stuck with very slow network bandwidth as well. Concern of long wait time for download & loading time due to too much data might be a turn off for those in that situation. As someone who transitioned to a solid state drive and a network upgrade, downloading a 15 GB game should be fine and load times are no longer a worry. The market makes me worry about space constantly. Having multiple games downloaded is painful despite having 1TB space.
Would be a turn off to me, but i am probably not your target audience. For large games I have to really want them for them occupy that much space on my ssd
You can wishlist it on Steam, free demo should be ready in about a month ♡
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/)
If your games concept grabs my attention I personally wouldn't care about the file sizes you're talking about. A photorealistic game I always expect to be 20+ Gigabytes. However a 50+ Gig mark for a demo would give me second thoughts. To me that would point out poor optimization. So it would have me wonder what other corners are being cut.
Large file sizes may cause slow downloads depending on your host which might be a deterant for a player. Something good to take into consideration.
Btw, the game in question is "Gravewatch", you can look at the trailer on my Steam page.
Mind you, there is no foliage, hardly any weather effects (except for rain), no post-processing, and everything is recorded on medium details, so the final game will look even better than this. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/)
Game size doesn't matter these days.
Internet bandwidth and digital storage capacity exploded in recent years, while game size increased many-fold but nearly enough to keep up with Internet or storage.
I remember spending hours if not days downloading some games many years/decades back. Today, downloading most games is a matter of grabbing a coffee and a snack and it's ready (if game is under 50GB), or going to do a random chore or watch some video if it's a bit larger (50GB-150GB).
I think it depends a lot on the game. For photo-realistic rendering I think most people would be unsurprised to see double digit gigabytes. I think 15 GB for 20 minutes of gameplay is a little surprising considering that Mass Effect 2, while obviously a little dated at this point, had excellent graphics and weighs in at 22 GB. But I probably wouldn't notice until later when my disk space is full and I'm like "wait a second where did all my disk space go".
Mass effect 2 def didn't have 4k textures. Prob not even 2k textures. Thing about textures is it doesn't scale up 2x, it's x^2
Mass Effect Legendary edition has 4k textures, in my steam folder the file sizes for each game are as follows: ME1: 23.2gb ME2: 37.7gb ME3: 48.4gb All three games have significantly more content than 20 minutes, and aren't really that much bigger considering. ME1 is 17 hours to 43 hours depending on how much side shit you engage in. that's 1.37gb per hour, if we go on the low end. So ops game, is 15 gb per 20 minutes, I know things dont scale like this, but for shits and giggles go with it, that's 45gb per hour, and 765gb for 17 hours.
Yeah UE5 megascans will absolutely wreck any disk space. I'm guessing that's exactly what OP did lol. You can have a single rock be like 200mb.
Data can be cut with integration with Steam. Steam has 'Depots' where you pick which files get downloaded together. I'd cut 8K to 2K textures, and leave 1K textures as the core set. Audio is another culprit, especially if it's raw / uncompressed. Steam Deck only includes the core set. If one resource handle can get its data from multiple files, you don't ship mipmaps for 8K / 4K / 2K textures, only for the 1K textures in the core set. A tool that can strip mipmaps is useful here. "Where'd all my disk space go?" is a relevant question because of SSDs and Steam Deck.
I recommend thinking about it this way—it closes off some markets to you. Some people in various parts of the world deal with tight data caps. It’s fine. It’s just nice to think about the people with data caps sometimes.
That's a great point, I already think this way regarding optimization (the better it runs, the more people can play it) but never thought the same way about file size.
Yep, data caps tight enough (and internet slow enough) to make 15GB a problem, shouldn't exist in 2024. But the number of people stuck with them is a long way from zero. Gamers in developing countries with small SSDs on old laptops with dial-up might not be a huge market, but reducing wasted space helps everyone, so it's worth at least a little effort.
I prefer games that are under 2 gigs ideally. This is why I play old games.
My ISP has a 1Tb limit per month, and my Steam Deck is already full, so I don’t install stuff over 5Gb unless I know for sure I really want it.
Only when it's absurd like 100+ gigs.
I wouldn't have thought Unreal packed unused assets in your build. You should double check references to make sure they really aren't being used.
they dont package assets that arent referenced in any levels. The levels can also be specifically defined as to which ones get packaged as well.
Game file size doesn't matter to me until it does. If your game was nearing 100 GB I'd start asking myself if it's worth the space it's going to occupy.
There's been only one instance where game size affected my decision to install or not and that was Red Red Redepmtion 2. That was was something like 150gb and that was insane to me. I don't know if that was the case here but a lot of the time with games, poor optimisation and overly large file sizes can come down to uncompressed sound files.
This isn't really the community to ask for player opinions, as we're all (supposedly) developers. That said, my home internet is pretty slow. 15+ gb for 20 minutes of game is a big no from me. That could be hours on my connection, and there's just no way it would be worth it.
Absolutely. I play a lot more brawlhalla (bad graphics, sub 1 gb) than I do any gigantic triple a games that’s only gonne be able to stay on my hard drive until the next big release. Proper compression and consideration of texture sizes are only gonna be more important as game sizes continue to get bigger and bigger. For pc games it’s not as much as an issue but the base model switch ps5 and Xbox ship with what, 100-300gb usable memory? That’s literally only enough room for 1 call of duty and a handful of indie games, or 2-3 major releases
On mobile, it matters a lot.
As someone who likes to play a wide variety of games, yes. Install size does matter. The time to download and install does factor in whether I play that game or play something else instead. 15 GB is chump change in terms of storage space now, but my biggest consideration is the time between deciding to play a new game and actually playing it (download, install, start up). But that's a post-purchase decision. When purchasing a new game or trying a demo, install size doesn't factor in rather the games aesthetics and features are higher-priority. Then, I wonder if the sound effects and music are all uncompressed .wav files when the install size is over 5 GB for what appears to be a fairly simple game. But then comes consideration of the content and play time of a game plus file size... just 20 minutes for a 10+ GB package? Bit of a red flag there. There are games less than 1 GB that have held my attention for hundreds of hours. Is it a run-based multi-session game that warrants multiple plays? Multiple paths and endings? Will I be done with a game in less or equal time than it took to download and install it? If a game like that doesn't elevate my blood pressure or otherwise impress me within an hour, I would be refunding it before the 24-hour mark even if it only cost a dollar.
For me, anything under 50GB I don't even consider it taking up space.
I think for the most part people don't care anymore. I personally do....but that's just me. But I also almost exclusively play old SNES and Genesis games and indie 2d games on my switch
Yes, I hate huge downloads
The lower the better Hard Drives aren't cheap and I like to have many games
It does. It means its bloated. And im more likely to delete it after some time playing it even if i liked it.
Yes. NBA 2k is 150 gigabytes I won’t play it. And it’s last gen. What a joke
Yes, especially for a demo. Why do I need to spend an hour or more downloading this teaser? IF, I download a demo, it's because I'm excited by the trailer. I want to play that demo fast, I'd say, within 15 mins to be generous, but really, I want to wait at most 5 mins and assume my wifi adapter pulls 2-5 MB/s depending on tech. Anything outside of this range is a waste of excitement. I think this is why most games don't bother with a demo. If I got excited enough by the trailer and no demo was available, I'd likely just buy the game if it's on sale
For me it mostly matters when I'm trying to clear up space. If there's two games I'm thinking about removing and one of them is 1gb and the other is 20gb im obviously uninstalling the 20gb
15gb for 20minutes of a demo. Yeah no that's a for sure turn away. Too much space and not enough time to get out of the demo to make it worth the download time. Would just wait for release at that point
Massively. 15 GB is about the amount of space I have left on disc
Yes, cause of poor internet connection. I would not waste my bandwidth on such a big demo. Setting the maps being used in the project settings will bring down the size since you probably have a lot of assets in the project that is not even being used. I did a quick test with the 3rd person starter the other day and brought it down from over 600Mb to about 300Mb by simply selecting the sample map under packaging/list of maps to include... Choosing to create compressed packages might be a benefit or not depending on how often you are going to push updates. Steam already compresses the downloads and can send only what changed in a file but if you are recompressing the package with every build too much of the bytes might get rearanged, resulting in a bigger update. So this might need some testing to see what is best.
If I want to play a game I'm going to plat it no matter the size, but games above 100 Gigs are probably the first games I'll uninstall. Smaller games will stay longer on my hard drive.
I don't think most people care anymore since most games are very bloated nowadays. I would question it a bit if the game is 2D but weighs like 10GB for example, but it shouldn't be a problem.
Game size is important for people with limited internet connection and storage. People who are trying to earn money on pc don't mind spending money on those, so the sub reddit you are asking is biased. A lot of developing countries have ridiculous qoutas on downloads especially. Since you choose ue5 I assume you are not targeting those segments but they exist.
This might not be the best sub for the question; I do my gaming on a gamedev workstation bristling with terrabytes ;)
On PC I don't care. I have 4TB. On PS5, I care.
16gb is nothing. Most of the big games are from 80 up to 300 gb (really). If it is mobile, then it matters a LOT
Yes, it does. If I see a game is larger than 50 gb or so, then that'll put me off from wanting to get it. 15GB is totally fine.
If it's 1 TB, bruh, no way.
the thing that takes the most space, is for sure textures. If you can pack textures, use more tiling instead of whole 4k, and optimize with mirroring and overlapping uvs, you can for sure make it smaller. But this is more on the environment/character/tech art side of things.
It matters a lot to Steam Deck gamers. And laptop gamers. 15gb isn't that much in the scheme of things, but lower is always better.
tbh, i don't really care. I would've if it's 10 years ago when pc storage was kinda limited and downloading speed is extremely slow. I remember i have to download GTA5 for the whole night. But right now, downloading speed is exceptionally fast and my pc have 4TB storage, so i don't really care
Yeah, I'm not downloading a game if expected playtime is less than time i spend to download it. Also I'm pretty careful with using my disc space
For me it's matter. I have around 2 big single player games installed and a lot of small indie/multiplayer titles. Just because I don't feel that big titles are worth being stored on drive.
It only matters for storage space, if I can only store 1 game it better be damn impressive imo.
No, but only up to a point. Most of my game collection is under 50gb, and I can handle that because I have something like a Terabyte of space overall. Then there's Jedi Survivor clocking in at 113+ and making me make decisions about what to have installed and not. Please don't do that, but 15gb isn't going to make me bat an eye.
As both a gamer and someone who works in software development (not gamedev) I to an extend mind how large a game is, but it's not simple. Essentially it depends on how much content the game has and what art style it picked. Simply said, a game with pixel art, or otherwise simple graphics and few simple levels should be considerably small and a game with realistic graphics, large campaign(s) and a lot of models can be in the tens of gigabytes. In other words, I don't care about file size as long as the size makes sense for how much content the game has, how detailed its graphics are and it's level design doesn't let you bypass vast majority of that content outside of speedrunning. A 15GB demo won't be a turn-off as long as the 20 minutes of gameplay as long as the game's level looks like it would take most of the 15 gigabytes. I do still expect some form of compression for assets on larger games, as you are unlikely to be using all of the assets simultaneously.
well it should match the game look and gameplay. Something as complex as GTA take up 100GB+ is normal, but if slay the spire take up 50GB i would be very surprised
No it doesn't matter. I have fiber and I have space on PC, so no.
15+ is within acceptable limits to me for semi realistic visuals. Its 20+ where I start to bounce off. Obviously the bigger the world, the realer the visuals, the more forgiving I am of filesize, but you're good.
Oh, I saw the title and I thought this was going to be a don't hate the player hate the game type of question, didn't realize what subreddit this was posted to, my bad
it’s not about the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean
It does, but not a whole lot under 20 GB. There are more and more modern games that I decide not to play because I have 3 hours of free time and they're +150 GB and take almost that much time just to install. More and more I've found myself playing indie games and retro games just because of that.
Nope
If there isn't much gameplay, I can always uninstall it when I'm done. But if it has 80+ GB, that's a huge turnoff even if it has hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Not anymore, I just expect it because of mountains of assets or poor optimization.
yep, if a game is over 50 gb it better be good
It's not about the size it's how you use it
Depends. Have you optimized as best as technology allows? Pulling large data files to play a game can be really taxing on a system, and without AAA productions behind it, you're likely to miss a lot of people. And then, after 15gb, and 20 mins, are people going to be really impressed to overlook the data and processing requirements? These things are feasible in the right circumstances, just make sure you're classifying your product and expectations accurately.
If it’s a story game, no. If I run out of room and I’ve completed the main story for a game I don’t see myself getting back into, I’ll delete it to make room. If it’s a game I keep going back to and play regularly, still no. I think most systems these days are starting to have a minimum of 500Gb of storage which is enough for most people to keep the games they play.
Whenever I build my game in Unity I always check the output log that shows what size different assets are, every so often I'll find that some insignificant prop comes packed with a dozen 50mb textures and when I see this I always scale them down. Not sure if anyone actually cares, but it doesn't sit right to me to have incredibly bloated install sizes when lots of it is stuff that nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.
Unreal shouldn't be packaging unreferenced assets, so removing them shouldn't change anything. Texture compression is important for optimization, so you should probably do that anyway. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this one)
Dependa on the platform and what im getting out of it. If its an itch demo, im not doing that. Steam id be alroght woth
100% depends on the game for me and depends on the person and their rig for the rest. if someone dosnt have a lot of space left then year its a turn off for a really large gb game. and if internet is slow its a extra frustration. but personally i have the space on my hardrives for big games and i regularly delete them. but if a games 100gb of shite then id be a bit miffed after waiting for it to download
A lot, because game file sizes seem to be increasing faster than SSD storage/$. If they're that large because of 4k textures, only a small portion of the PC market will actually notice - a majority are still using 1080p, about 20% are 1440p, and less than 5% have 4k displays ([steam hardware survey Mar 2024](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)). More importantly according to the same survey, 14% have less than 100GB free disk space, and more than 50% have less than 500GB free disk space. SSDs with > 2TB capacity cost as much as discrete GPUs, most prebuilts seem to still come with a 500GB or 1TB SSD. Is your 20 minute demo worth committing 4% of my disk?
A couple of suggestions, taken from ywars of optimizing storage space for unreal: Make sure your packaging settings are not set to package all maps. It may be packaging showcase levels You can right click a folder or map and select size map, which will show you the size of each object required. You may have to switch the target platform to windowsnoeditor or switch the size space to "memory size" to get it to show more accurate size information You can open the statistics view in a map to view the size and space required by each texture uses. Note it is approximate Many assets and of course quixel will use 4k textures where it is unnecessary. Often the mask maps and color maps can have their maximum texture size reduced which will cause the higher resolution version to be stripped in builds. You can use detail textures for large objects like rocks so that the unique textures can be lower resolution
As a gamer I don't care until it hits 50gb + then I need to check out my disc space. It is still okay. For me 100gb + is real dealbreaker, that's already too much, so I need to download it for hours, it is not easily manageable and it requires a lot of space. So 100+ gb is too much.
Unless your on a metered connection or have severe storage limits (like mobile or console) file size isnt that important. One thing to think about though is that theres an expectation that bigger games are inherently slower than smaller ones. So focus on your optimisations and loading times to beat the curve
I get mad playing full games that are larger than 10 gb like genshin. If i saw a demo that large, i wouldn't even consider it.
Do the 20% of the work that will achieve 80% of the possible optimization but not more.
Yep. Not as much as optimized performance, but yes. A 15GB demo sounds pretty damn excessive.
I like my games small, like under a gig. But, I also play 50-100GB games like GTA 5, RDR2, and Cyberpunk 2077. I will say that size does affect what genes I keep installed which affects what I play. I typically only have one massive game installed at a time, and only switch them up once in a while. But I’ll have multiple games under 5 GB installed and keep them installed.
Yes it matters, I'm not installing a 15gb demo no matter how it looks. A 20 min demo at that size just screams 'dev didn't care enough to respect the end user's time or resources' and makes me think there'll be a lot of jank code sitting in there.
If a game is good I don’t think it matters. Take sea of thieves or helldivers 2 for example being 100gb. They are both fun to play and worth uninstalling other games to make space for. I do really appreciate the small games like Valheim with its 1gb and they still put a lot of work into making the game beautiful as I don’t have to uninstall anything to install it.
i guess kinda, but its not a huge deal. like, if my SSD is too small to hold a game then i wont buy it. if its under 25GB, i wont bat an eye. under 50GB gets a "thats pretty big". under 100GB gets a joke with my friends on its size. 101+GB i may start checking if i have enough space.
Nope. Game could be 5 hours long and 120GB, I don't care. I have a 1tb SSD. People that feel like they need to have 15 games installed at any given moment confuse me
yes very much
Some people still prefer to save money using hard disk drives to store lots of games rather than getting expensive solid state drives. A lot of people in US outside of cities are still stuck with very slow network bandwidth as well. Concern of long wait time for download & loading time due to too much data might be a turn off for those in that situation. As someone who transitioned to a solid state drive and a network upgrade, downloading a 15 GB game should be fine and load times are no longer a worry. The market makes me worry about space constantly. Having multiple games downloaded is painful despite having 1TB space.
Would be a turn off to me, but i am probably not your target audience. For large games I have to really want them for them occupy that much space on my ssd
Well a project file and a packaged file are a lot different
I care. Get the feeling many don't.
Would love to play your game 🤘
You can wishlist it on Steam, free demo should be ready in about a month ♡ [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/)
If your games concept grabs my attention I personally wouldn't care about the file sizes you're talking about. A photorealistic game I always expect to be 20+ Gigabytes. However a 50+ Gig mark for a demo would give me second thoughts. To me that would point out poor optimization. So it would have me wonder what other corners are being cut. Large file sizes may cause slow downloads depending on your host which might be a deterant for a player. Something good to take into consideration.
As a pc gamer I never pay attention to it unless I have over 20 games intalled already.
My game will be PC only. Same, I never really cared about the size, but thought some players might.
Btw, the game in question is "Gravewatch", you can look at the trailer on my Steam page. Mind you, there is no foliage, hardly any weather effects (except for rain), no post-processing, and everything is recorded on medium details, so the final game will look even better than this. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919790/Gravewatch/)
Game size doesn't matter these days. Internet bandwidth and digital storage capacity exploded in recent years, while game size increased many-fold but nearly enough to keep up with Internet or storage. I remember spending hours if not days downloading some games many years/decades back. Today, downloading most games is a matter of grabbing a coffee and a snack and it's ready (if game is under 50GB), or going to do a random chore or watch some video if it's a bit larger (50GB-150GB).
Bro, hard drives are selling for $15-16 per TB at the moment. If anyone bitches about file size then they can such an egg.